The black spruce beetle is a broadly distributed and fairly common species that infests wood used for solid wood packing material (SWPM). It is considered a secondary pest (i.e., attacks weakened or recently killed trees, including a number of conifers) in Europe and Asia, but the black spruce beetle was also not considered to be a threat to apparently healthy trees. The potential of this species to attack and damage living trees in the U.S. is largely unknown.